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Inventing Security

It is understandable that since the development of self-consciousness, thousands of years ago, human beings have had to come to cope and deal with a vast sense of aloneness, separation and in general a great sense of vulnerability. These are things it did not know or experience in an ongoing way prior to that. In coming to that awareness, human kind reactively and somewhat habitually turned to ways of thinking that attempt to bring relief and security to this new aspect of consciousness. In our newly emerging self consciousness, when there had not been the kind of realization to help cope with life, something had to be created. Creating ideas that superficially relieve our insecurity is what humankind has done.
John Shelby Spong indicates in his book “Eternal Life: A New Vision” that ” any serious study of the meaning in religion in life must identify these self-serving attempts to build impenetrable defensive walls behind which human beings seek to hide their fear and thus to cope with these threatening realities. Variations on these themes can be found in almost all religious institutions and traditions.” I would add to this that this aspect of our thinking has, as well, been extended into how we embrace secularized notions of science, economics and other ideological notions.
If we want to in fact experience a deeper realization of life and explore meaning in a more comprehensive way we must understand what it is that we do in our effort to cope with death and fear and aloneness and ultimately separateness; all aspects of the self aware being. We must look to understand how religion, economics, politics and culture contribute to a power to compel conformity and to enable non conformists to be effectively silenced or ostracized. There seems to be a human tendency to find refuge, security in conforming and what is considered normal. Even in these modern times of change we often treat new ideas as fashionable that become the norm that are aspired to. In the same light we seem to grasp and attach to external notions that are fixed and provide stability and are not willing to look honestly at what may not be so fixed and permanent that is contrary to what we have been led to desire or believe.
The way to make sense of it all is not in searching, in a way that has been our habitual tendency, but to set this all aside and to inquire in a way that causes us to explore more deeply, our own individual consciousness and how it has evolved and where it has evolved out of. It involves a more authentic and self directed inquiry and investigation of what the truth of this may be. This ultimately involves setting aside our old ways of reacting and processing: not eliminating them but to allow for a space of deeper seeing to influence them in a new way that we have not before known.

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So we have to understand the existence, this life, our relationship to society. We have not only to understand our relationship with each other, with society, but to bring about a radical change in that relationship. And that is our responsibility. I do not think we feel this urgency. – Krishnamurti